---
title: "Against Yourself"
description: "On self-sabotage, the etymology of sabotage, and the people who punish you for hoping"
date: 2026-05-10
category: Literature
readingTime: "2 min read"
---


There are 1.25 billion smokers on this planet. Not one of them lit a cigarette believing it would be good for their health. Every year, roughly eight million people die from smoking-related causes. The data is not ambiguous. The warnings are not subtle. And yet.

The same logic applies to the midnight refrigerator raid. You open the door, scan the shelves, and reach for something you know will not serve you. You know this while you are doing it. The awareness does not stop the hand.

Or the driver who, in a flash of road rage, unbuckles his seatbelt and steps out of his car to confront a stranger. He is aware, somewhere beneath the adrenaline, of the probabilities. He does it regardless.

We call mistakes the things we do without knowing better. What do we call the things we do despite knowing better?

---

The word sabotage comes from the French sabo, a heavy wooden clog worn by workers in the late 1800s. During the industrial revolution, as machines began replacing human labour, French workers protested by jamming their clogs into the machinery to destroy it. The sabot became the weapon. The saboteur became the person who wielded it. And sabotage became the act of deliberate destruction from within.

The etymology matters because self-sabotage is exactly this: the clog in your own machinery. Not an external force breaking your plans, but you, reaching into the gears yourself, knowing precisely what will happen when you do.

---

There is a Turkish proverb: "Umut fakirin ekmeğidir." Hope is the bread of the poor. The implication is that hope is what you reach for when you have nothing else. A consolation. Something that fills the stomach symbolically but never literally.

I have always disliked this framing. Hope is not exclusive to the poor, and it is not passive. It requires no resources, no permission, no preconditions. In a world where the next moment is genuinely unknown, hope is perhaps the most rational orientation available.

And yet hope has become something to be embarrassed about. In a time with abundant, visible reasons for pessimism, being hopeful is read as naivety. As self-deception. As a failure to assess the situation properly.

---

I have noticed a particular type of person I think of as a hope vacuum. They do not simply lack hope themselves. They are hostile to it in others. When someone expresses optimism, the hope vacuum responds with corrections, qualifications, reminders of all the reasons the optimism is misplaced. Not always out of cruelty. Sometimes out of a genuine belief that they are performing a service, protecting the hopeful person from inevitable disappointment.

The effect is the same regardless of intent. It drains the room. It converts hope from a private orientation into a social risk.

I have wondered about their inner lives. Is the hostility philosophical, a Schopenhauerian conclusion that the world does not warrant optimism? Or is it personal, a reaction to their own extinguished fire being reflected in someone else?

Both are possible. Neither justifies the behaviour.

---

Turkish makes a distinction that matters here. Umut is hope: rooted, durable, directional. Heves is a passing enthusiasm, bright and brief, gone before it settles. The language insists they are different things.

I think the hope vacuums confuse the two. They see umut and diagnose it as heves, then feel vindicated when the initial excitement fades. But the fading of excitement is not the death of hope. It is the natural settling of a fire into coals. Still hot. Still capable. Quieter.

The sabotage, in the end, is not always against the self. Sometimes it is directed at the hope of someone else. And the weapon, more often than not, is a single well-placed sentence dressed up as concern.